[GLLUG] Re: CD-burning box: suggestions needed!

[Chick Tower]

After seeing the whole thing in action last night, I think it's a 
winner.  I think Penguicon attendees will use it, as well as patrons of 
the Gone Wired Cafe, as long as they know about it.

As a Slackware <http://www.slackware.com/getslack/> and Mandrake (now 
Mandriva <http://www1.mandrivalinux.com/en/ftp.php3>) user, I was a 
little disappointed they haven't been included in the available ISO 
list, but I was hesitant to say anything because, if everyone nominated 
their favorite distro, the list would become overwhelming.  [Not 
everyone has shown similar restraint.  :)]  Plus, the fact that I have 
only dial-up Internet access precludes me from downloading any ISOs to 
provide for the box.  (All but the last of the links I've included are 
for distro downloads.)  However, one distro I think should be included 
is the free version of Xandros 
<http://www.xandros.com/products/home/desktopoc/dsk_oc_download.html>.  
It's touted as an easy-to-use distro designed to make switching from MS 
products easier than it is with most distros, so it would be ideal for 
targetting Linux newcomers.  I also think we should include some distros 
that are designed to run well on older hardware, such as Vector Linux 
<http://www.vectorlinux.com/mod.php?mod=userpage&menu=12&page_id=4&PHPSESSID=40d990a42e833de862a69c9ebef636ff>.  
Further, I suggest we try to have the ten or fifteen most popular 
distros included, perhaps using Distrowatch 
<http://www.distrowatch.com/> as the arbiter of popularity since I'm not 
aware of any other metric.

Another idea I'd like to suggest is a CD of software that is in common 
use, gets updated frequently, and/or is a huge download.  I'm thinking 
of things like the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox and Thundebird, 
the Java SDK and run-time environment, the Linux kernel source, and 
media player codecs that frequently don't come with distros.  I'm sure 
there are other worthy candidates, too.  I realize the Open CD includes 
some of this, so I don't mean to suggest duplicate or another set of 
programs.  I mean things that people might want that wouldn't ordinarily 
fill a CD, all together on one CD for administrative simplicity, rather 
than having a menu choice for each of these items.  Maybe Matt would 
even consent to putting his CD-burning Perl script on it, as I suspect 
others would want to set up similar rigs for other shows.

                              Chick

Matt Graham wrote:

>OK, lots of suggestions received about the CDs we should have available 
>to burn.  The list now looks like this:
>
>Gentoo 2005.1 LiveCD [*]
>Fedora Core (all 4 CDs)
>SuSE (all 4 or 5 CDs)
>Debian install CD
>The Open CD (open-source software for Windows) [*]
>Ubuntu
>Knoppix
>Knoppix CeBIT
>FreeBSD
>OpenBSD network installation CD
>The Ultimate Boot CD [*]
>IPCop
>m0n0wall
>LAS Linux
>P.H.L.A.K  (Professional Hackers Linux Assault Kit)
>
>...that's 22 ISO images by my count.  I have copies of the ones with [*] 
>marked by them on my laptop's hard disk right now, so nobody needs to 
>bring those.  The others... well, hope somebody has them or can 
>download them!  We can of course start with a few images and add more 
>later; it's trivial to put an "every 10 minutes, check to see if mtime 
>on config file is newer than it was at script startup; if so, reload 
>config file" into the script.  
>  
>